The Crown by Nancy Bilyeau Read Free Book Online

with her, to keep her company. And so she did. Our many letters went back and forth, but I saw Margaret only when they came back to Stafford Castle for visits. My father traveled to London once a year, to maintain the small house he’d been able to hold on to, but my mother and I always stayed behind. We no longer had money for traveling.
    I didn’t understand Margaret’s marriage. Not only did she seem glum at the prospect, but at dinner Elizabeth was actually distraught about it.
    “He’s one of my husband’s retainers, this William Cheyne,” said Elizabeth, angry patches of red flaring in her hollow white cheeks. “He’s asked for Margaret, and the duke agreed, without consulting me. He’s quite happy that Cheyne will take her without dowry.”
    “Then it’s a love match?” asked Ursula Pole Stafford, my cousin Henry’s wife. She was heavy with child, her third pregnancy in five years.
    “Margaret hasn’t spoken more than a few words to him!” Elizabeth cried. “Oh, I can’t bear the thought of losing her to a rough young husband. How could I sleep at night, knowing what crimes he might be committing against an innocent girl?”
    Margaret got up and stroked Elizabeth’s shoulder. “Hush, do not be troubled,” she said. As always, Margaretworried more about her fragile older half sister than herself.
    All might have been well if it weren’t for the seventeen-year-old sitting on Elizabeth’s other side, Charles Howard. “Come now, Duchess,” he drawled, “don’t some ladies relish crimes in the night?”
    Elizabeth drew back from him, her lower lip trembling. Then, to everyone’s surprise, she jumped to her feet and began pulling on her long sleeves.
    “Do you see this?” she cried. And after a moment, as she pulled the sleeve higher, we did see it, a long, faint, yellowish-purple bruise mottling her thin right arm. “I saw my husband, and the duke told me to cease my oppositions, that I must live with him and sleep beside him again. I asked him where would he put his whore, and he did this to me.”
    We sat there, aghast, as the duchess turned to the right and to the left, holding up her arm to us with some sort of strange, terrible pride I couldn’t understand. Of course, if her father the Duke of Buckingham were alive, Norfolk wouldn’t dare beat and humiliate his wife so. We all knew that.
    Little Mary Howard looked down at her plate, and I wondered what she thought of her father.
    “Sister, calm yourself,” pleaded my cousin Henry. The most important thing to Henry and Ursula was to keep the family safe, to avoid all controversy and criticism, so that there would never again be grounds for suspicion.
    Now, for the first time, my mother spoke, in her heavily accented English. “Duchess, we are grateful for your help in gaining a position for Joanna with the queen.”
    All eyes turned on me, as I shifted, uncomfortable, in my seat.
    Elizabeth nodded. “Despite everything, the queen is still devoted to you,” she said to my mother, who smiled triumphantly.
    When my mother was younger than I, only fourteen, she had left her country as a maid of honor to Princess Katherine of Spain, who was bound to marry Prince Arthur of England and be queen of his island kingdom. Katherine wed Arthur, who died young, and then his brother, Henry, and finally became queen. My mother Isabella served her devotedly through it all, and six months after Katherine was crowned, she married theking’s handsome cousin, my father, Sir Richard Stafford, one of the finest athletes in the land. Another marriage that began with the highest of hopes.
    I was born less than two years later, and shipped to Stafford Castle, to be cared for by governesses and tutors and maids. My mother’s place was with the queen, and I saw her only a few times a year. It was not an unusual arrangement.
    The Duke of Buckingham was arrested, tried, and beheaded when I was ten years old, and everything changed. All Staffords were unwelcome